From the Magazine

Can Anyone Repair National Lampoon’s Devastated Brand?

Over the past 15 years, three devotees of the comedy institution have attempted to restore the humor brand to its former glory. What happened instead was direct-to-video movies, lawsuits, crippling debt, and two prison sentences.

FUNNY BUSINESS
Some of the players, past and present, in the almost 50-year saga of National Lampoon.

Illustration by Rick Meyerowitz.

When Alan Donnes, the first of the last three leaders of National
Lampoon not to be sentenced to prison, joined the company, five years
ago, he discovered that it was a magnet for off-the-wall film pitches.
One day, he took a call from a guy who knew a guy with $5 million and a
script for “the perfect National Lampoon movie.” “It always scares me
when they say, ‘It’s the perfect National Lampoon movie,’ ” Donnes
said, sitting in his office at National Lampoon headquarters, in Los
Angeles.

This one, called Monkey’s Paw, was about a kid who, after making a wish
on a magical monkey’s paw he found in an archaeologist neighbor’s house,
gets to have sex with the hottest girl in his high school. “But there’s
no limit, because it’s a monkey’s paw,” Donnes explained. “So, the
girl is compulsively having sex with him. And eventually the girl
realizes the only way out of this is if she fucks him to death. Am I
kidding? No. She has to fuck him so much he will die. And the guy’s
like, ‘Perfect National Lampoon.’ I said, ‘It’s not perfect National
Lampoon.’ ‘Yeah, National Lampoon, all about fucking and stuff.’ I say,
‘Where’s the sex in Animal House?’ ‘Huh? There’s lots of sex in Animal
House.’ ‘No, there’s not. The Vacation movies—no sex.’ ” And so on.

Donnes, a 56-year-old former stand-up comedian and boxing manager who is
now the president of one of America’s best-known comedy brands, has,
like the company he is charged with reviving, endured a rough decade. He
is operating on his second kidney transplant, the first having failed
when he was bitten by a brown recluse spider. In his office, where we
were talking, there were nods to National Lampoon’s former glory:
posters from classic movies like Animal House and Vacation,
shrink-wrapped DVDs containing the complete digitized archives of the
magazine that had hit early-70s America like a grenade.

Donnes had grown up on not just the magazine but also the extraordinary
efflorescence of talent and humor that came out of it. The magazine’s
spin-off stage show National Lampoon’s Lemmings, along with National
Lampoon Radio Hour, had launched John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray,
Gilda Radner, Christopher Guest, and Harold Ramis, providing Saturday
Night Live with much of its original cast as well as its first head
writer. The movies Animal House and Vacation were based on stories
published in National Lampoon (the Vacation stories written by Lampoon
staffer and future 80s-teen-comedy king John Hughes). Animal House was
co-written by Ramis, directed by John Landis, and produced by Ivan
Reitman, who collectively would be responsible for decades of
influential film comedies (Trading Places, Ghostbusters, Old School),
often starring fellow Lampoon alumni. It’s not a stretch to say that the
Lampoon sensibility and people have informed much of modern humor in
America, from Spy to gross-out comedy to Judd Apatow.

PRIME TIMES
From left: John Landis and John Belushi on the set of 1978’s Animal House; the film’s poster; Harold Ramis and
Chevy Chase while filming 1983’s Vacation.

From Left, from mptvimages.com, Universal Pictures/Photofest, by Steve Schapiro.

Donnes’s office also suggested the depths of the brand’s fall. It was a
small room in a tiny suite off a narrow courtyard in the innards of
sleepy Sunset Gower Studios, in a part of Hollywood once known as
Poverty Row. This was where Lampoon had gone to nurse its wounds. To
Donnes’s right, a glass case framed a certificate of its now worthless
stock, which was currently trading at a fifth of a penny per share. To
his left, in the wall above his head, a divot made by Donnes’s National
Lampoon coffee mug memorialized one of his lower moments.

When Donnes arrived in 2012, after his two predecessors decamped for the
hoosegow, he found a devastated company. To save money, the offices,
then on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, had been turned into a
makeshift storage facility, and rent hadn’t been paid. The phones had
been turned off, and for two years calls to National Lampoon had been
routed to the pink-cased iPhone of Cora Victoriano, the beloved longtime
receptionist/office momager who in a previous life worked in the office
of Imelda Marcos. Victoriano, already owed at least $50,000 in back
pay, had used her own pension money to pay other employees’ salaries. It
was left for Donnes to deal with the hangover: a tangle of lawsuits,
debts, conflicting contracts, and very little money.

“Have you ever heard the term ‘corpse-fucking’?” he asked. “That’s
kind of what was going on here. Can we get one more fuck out of the
brand before it dies?” (To be fair, one of those final fucks was
National Lampoon’s Dirty Movie, written and produced by, and also
starring, Donnes.) “No agency would talk to us,” Donnes says. “They’d
say, ‘We met with National Lampoon: they’re assholes.’ ”

Donnes was trying to do things differently. He had managed to get the
National Lampoon name removed from some of the worst of the licensing
deals committed before he arrived. And so, although tempted by the
prospect of a “sizable” licensing fee, he had resisted the allure of
Monkey’s Paw.

“A movie about National Lampoon even now,” he said, “would be better
than any movie National Lampoon’s putting out.”

VIDEO: Zinger-Off! American Comedy vs. British Comedy in Television

The Base-Metal Age

It was 1999, near the peak of the dot-com boom, and Dan Laikin was
flying high. The son of a pizzeria owner turned insurance salesman,
Laikin came from a striving Indiana family. His brother, Bob, was the
C.E.O. of Brightpoint, a Fortune 500 wireless-services company. His
sister, Sue, was a respected rabbi who ran the Hillel Jewish center at
Indiana University. Laikin himself, 37 at the time, had been a
good-looking kid who dropped out of college and worked as a contractor
before marrying into an Indianapolis funeral-home fortune. He had since
grown a successful residential-development company and made lucrative
investments in tech stocks. He and his wife, Jackie, lived with their
three children in a gated estate in the affluent suburb of Carmel, in a
mansion with an indoor tennis court. They had also recently bought
Cher’s 8,800-square-foot house on Point Dume, in Malibu, for $3.65
million, to use as a vacation home. Laikin was always looking for new
opportunities, and now, as he scanned the classifieds of The Wall Street
Journal, an ad caught his eye: “a major media brand” was seeking a $1
millionish investment to help it grow online. Laikin cut out the ad.

When he got back to his office, he called the number and found out that
the brand was National Lampoon. After its first five glorious years, the
Lampoon had gradually transitioned to a silver age, and then to an age
of progressively baser metals. For one brief, misbegotten period in the
late 1980s, junk-bond-fueled corporate raiders installed the actor Tim
Matheson, who had played Otter in Animal House, as C.E.O.

Jim Jimirro, who’d started the Disney Channel but now spent much of his
time giving library lectures on the Great American Songbook, had bought
the company in 1991, puzzlingly disappearing the iconic brand into the
forgettable corporate embrace of his blandly named J2 Communications,
and turned it into a licensing business. The last movie produced by the
company, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, had come out in 1989.
The magazine’s frequency dwindled to once a year, then in 1998 it shut
down for good. (Under the original license from the Harvard Lampoon,
National Lampoon was required to publish at least one issue a year to
retain the name, but Jimirro negotiated an agreement releasing the
company from that obligation, in return for forfeiting the right to ever
publish the magazine again.) But while the company may have been
slapping its name on dreck like National Lampoon’s Attack of the 5’2”
Women, and been only sporadically profitable, Jimirro had just three
full-time employees, and National Lampoon threw off a nice salary for
him. Then, as the Web took off in the late 90s, Jimirro decided to try
to launch a Web site with original content and hired a small creative
staff to put it together, led by a journeyman comedy writer named Scott
Rubin.

Laikin flew to L.A. to meet with Jimirro. Arriving at three P.M. at an
office building in Westwood, Laikin found a darkened, 3,000-foot space
on the 10th floor with only Jimirro and his skeleton staff in one
illuminated corner. Laikin says that he offered to buy 15 percent of the
company, only to be told that Jimirro had changed his mind about how
much investment he wanted. (Jimirro disputes this account.) But Laikin
still liked the opportunity, and, after returning to Indiana, he began
buying shares of JTWO, a lightly traded NASDAQ stock, on the open
market. He also began rounding up investors, many of whom were from
Indiana and had, like Laikin, married or been born into money. Paul
Skjodt’s wife was Mall of America developer Mel Simon’s daughter, and
the Skjodts and Laikins shared a driveway. Tim Durham’s wife was the
daughter of Beurt SerVaas, an Indianapolis business magnate and
politician whose holdings included The Saturday Evening Post. Chris
Williams came from the Zimmer family, which owned the orthopedic-supply
company (for a time owned by Bristol-Myers Squibb) that gave its name to
the Zimmer frame (as walkers are known in the U.K.). Soon, the group
owned 25 percent of J2.

Laikin didn’t exude heartland simplicity, exactly. He slicked back his
hair and wasn’t a stranger to dark Armani suits. (Donnes: “The first
time I met him, I thought: Someone liked Pulp Fiction a lot.”)
Impatient to realize what he saw as the brand’s untapped value, Laikin
kept bringing ideas to Jimirro. He got him a meeting at Creative Artists
Agency. Laikin says that he brought him a sponsorship deal with an
online ticket broker for a new sports section of the Web site, but that
Jimirro held out for more money and the deal went away. (Jimirro says
that “nothing like this happened.”)

The Laikin-Jimirro relationship turned increasingly contentious, and
what Laikin had envisioned as a fairly short-term and mostly passive
investment turned into a slow-motion hostile takeover that would last
three years. Jimirro’s board passed a poison pill. Laikin voted himself
onto the board and filed a proxy to name his own directors. Laikin and
Jimirro sued each other.

During the same period, something unexpected happened with one of
Jimirro’s licensing deals. The producers of a low-budget campus comedy
titled Van Wilder tested it in Orange County as National Lampoon’s Van
Wilder, and the audience scores rose dramatically. The movie, which
introduced the world to Ryan Reynolds, was a hit in theaters, and No. 1
on DVD for a while. And it lit a fire under Laikin and his co-investors.
Here was proof of their investment thesis: this was an undervalued brand
ripe for a turnaround.

Meanwhile, the takeover had become a war of attrition, with mounting
legal costs on both sides draining funds that could have otherwise gone
toward re-invigorating the company. Some employees were let go; others
agreed to pay cuts. By 2002, shortly after the release of Van Wilder,
Jimirro and Laikin reached a weary compromise. They would share power.
“It was very weird,” says Scott Rubin. “It was like there were two
regimes at the same time. Very confusing. And demoralizing.”

Foot on the Gas

Having originally viewed his investment as a two- to three-year thing,
Laikin was a reluctant hands-on leader, and he appointed Doug Bennett, a
former president of Macmillan Publishing, to run operations day-to-day.
This freed Laikin, who was more comfortable with his foot on the gas
than on the brake, to green-light deals and ideas. Laikin bought Lorne
Michaels’s Burly Bear, a closed-circuit TV network on 416 college
campuses, renamed it the National Lampoon College Network, and began
generating original programming. One of the new shows came from a
brainstorm Laikin had on a plane to Las Vegas: after seeing fellow
passengers high-fiving a tiny woman who turned out to be Bridget the
Midget, an ex-porn star and Howard Stern regular, he commissioned a
reality show that would follow her as she tried to re-invent herself as
a punk-rock musician. It was Laikin’s idea, too, to produce The
Hollywood Retorter, an attention-getting parody of the trade magazine
that appeared in 4,000 industry executives’ mailboxes one morning in
December 2002.

The company got a new name (National Lampoon, Inc.) and stock ticker
symbol (NLMP), made a deal with Rugged Land, a New York publisher, for a
National Lampoon book imprint, and got TV representation at the Endeavor
agency. Laikin hired Daniel Sarnoff, an heir to the RCA/NBC fortune, who
worked on a licensing deal to put Lampoon-branded video slot machines on
Indian reservations. Lampoon had another reality show in development,
Frat House (Big Brother on campus), was in talks to do a branded segment
on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, briefly produced a comedy game show called
National Lampoon’s Funny Money for the Game Show Network, and made a
pilot, ordered by Fox Sports, for a late-night talk show called On the
Bench with Jim Lampley. Laikin retained Matty Simmons, National
Lampoon’s founding publisher, to develop projects from the archives and
reach out to alumni from the golden age. Laikin got Chris Miller, who’d
written the original stories that became Animal House, to serve on a
creative advisory board, and also got in touch with Tony Hendra, who’d
edited the magazine for a few years and produced Lemmings.

To Scott Rubin, the future looked bright. Like Donnes, he had grown up
in the 1970s reading National Lampoon and revered it. Rubin had also
seen the brand become a victim of its own success. Once Animal House
became the top-grossing comedy in history in 1978, that was the version
of National Lampoon that got copied over and over, with an emphasis on
sophomoric rather than subversive. Now Rubin had been handed those
fabled reins, and he had big ambitions to restore the name to greatness.
At first, this took the form of misguidedly long humor pieces that
didn’t work on the Web, and he avoided anything that smacked of college
humor (though he did recommend that Jimirro do the Van Wilder deal). In
time, he found his groove, the Web site scored some big viral hits, and
it was nominated for a Webby award. Rubin felt like he was getting
somewhere, and he was deeply grateful to Laikin, who gave him a lot of
freedom and support.

A consequence of operating the company on a shoestring was that Laikin
gave breaks to a ton of kids in their early 20s who would never have had
the same opportunities at a more established company. He was constantly
taking in strays, giving internships to Hollywood-curious Hoosiers and
brothers from his son’s fraternity at Arizona State University, inviting
people to stay in his guesthouses, helping out with an employee’s rent,
buying another a ticket to fly home for Christmas, and sometimes going
far beyond that. When Mark Angotti, a family friend from Indiana, was
trying to overcome alcohol and gambling problems, Laikin set him up with
a psychotherapist, a trainer, a nutritionist, a place to live, and a job
at National Lampoon as vice president of programming and production. “I
can name person after person he put on payroll for a dollar or a
thousand dollars, who earned money and were given a third or fourth or
fifth chance in life,” Barry Layne, then a film executive, says.

The expansive approach to hiring led to an overstuffed roster. “There
were more people working there than seemed reasonable as a staff for a
company producing a certain level of content,” says Randi Siegel, a
development executive. The company was growing—every year, revenues
increased—but it still wasn’t making money. The last profitable year
had been 2000. In 2003, the first full year under Laikin’s half-control,
the company lost $5.9 million. In 2004, it lost another $5.1 million.
When cash flow was insufficient to cover payroll, Laikin would reach
into his own pocket.

The other person pouring money into the company to cover the losses and
provide working capital was Tim Durham, from the original investor
group. Durham owned an Indianapolis leveraged-buyout firm called
Obsidian and an Ohio financial-services firm, Fair Finance. He and
Laikin talked all the time, made investments together, put each other on
their companies’ boards, and would meet in Vegas to socialize.
Indianapolis raised a collective eyebrow in 2003, when Durham enjoyed a
windfall from investing in Laikin’s brother Bob’s company, Brightpoint.
(The stock shot up after Brightpoint announced surprisingly strong
earnings, and Durham claimed to have netted $30 million.) A few years
later, Durham would buy a small Texas cell-phone distributor at a moment
when Brightpoint had a confidential acquisition proposal pending. Durham
would ultimately become the second-largest shareholder in Lampoon, after
Dan Laikin, and together they would fund the company, putting in
millions of dollars over time. “They were asshole buddies,” a former
executive says.

Left, Daniel Laikin in 2007; Durham at home, in Indianapolis, with his portraits by Peter Max, 2007.

Left, by Steve Goldstein/The New York Times/Redux; Right, by Tony Valainis/Indianapolis Monthly.

A Rolling Menagerie

Laikin had created a workplace that could have appeared in one of the
company’s films. The National Lampoon offices were a rolling menagerie
of beautiful women, D-list celebrities, has-been TV actors, porn stars,
burnouts, also-rans, and talented young people thrilled just to have a
job. “I looked at the office and would say, I don’t know where else we
would work, where else this would be O.K.,” Marty Dundics, a creative
director, recalls.

There were the “scanner girls,” gorgeous wannabe actresses positioned
prominently near the front of the office, whose ostensible purpose was
to spend all day scanning old issues of the magazine for a digital
archive. “That scanning pace was very slow,” says Ben Gleib, who was
hired to host his own show on National Lampoon College Network. “I
think they maybe scanned a magazine a week.” There were constant weird
cameos in the hallways: there went Coolio, or Married with Children’s
David Faustino, or porn queen Tera Patrick, or Henry Rollins, or
Primus’s Les Claypool, or reality-TV star Andy Milinakis. And then there
were the recurring roles: Laikin instituted a policy to give both Saved
by the Bell’s Dennis Haskins and Kato Kaelin, of O.J.-trial-witness
fame, small parts in National Lampoon films and shows.

Kaelin was one of a handful of F.O.D.’s—Friends of Dan—whose precise
roles at the company escaped the rank and file. Kaelin had met Chris
Williams, one of the Indiana investors and an indefatigable playboy, at
a party and had come in and pitched a show called Houseguest. Kaelin,
whom Laikin put on payroll, ended up hosting two College Network shows,
National Lampoon Presents and Eye for an Eye, as well as appearing in a
number of video sketches on the Web site. His peers at the company found
themselves both thinking that Kaelin was exactly what the company
shouldn’t be doing and genuinely liking him. “You don’t know why he’s
here,” Rubin recalls, “but you surrender to it. I surrendered to Kato
Kaelin.”

Another F.O.D. was Reno Rolle, a bronzed, coiffed, square-jawed inventor
with the intense self-possession of Tony Robbins. He had gotten his
start peddling the Rolle Beach Blanket, featuring weighted corners and
hidden pockets, up and down the South Jersey boardwalk, and had since
gone on to market the Ab Isolator and invent the Spin Fryer. He was a
friend of Laikin’s, and an early investor, and Laikin had initially
promised him a job running the new company. He headed up some
straight-to-video projects and could often be seen in the halls talking
up, say, a George Bush Countdown Clock. “Reno undeservedly became a
punching bag for a lot of people,” Laikin says.

Then there was Chris Williams, the one member of the investor group who,
though he had grown up in Indiana, had been living in California for
years. He was “a real-life version of Bluto,” Scott Rubin says, “with
millions of dollars.” Five feet eight inches and 260 pounds, Williams
drove a white Hummer and typically wore flip-flops, a ratty T-shirt, and
shorts that let him show off the 9-mm. bullet wound in his left thigh,
which he had accidentally self-inflicted late one margarita-fueled
night. He carried around a pillowcase filled with as much as $90,000 in
cash and would freely pronounce things like “I come from a wealthy
family” and “I’m one of the money guys.” Williams was also an addict
(vodka, tequila, cocaine, gambling), and a roller-coaster binge in Vegas
would lead him to join National Lampoon’s staff. During 11 minutes of
baccarat spread over seven days at the Rio (interrupted only by a trip
to his suite next door to put on pants—he’d been wearing just boxer
shorts—after a Japanese whale’s offended wife complained), he won
$700,000. Weeks later, he lost it all at the Aladdin. He was drunk at
the time, and the casino settled for 62 cents on the dollar, he told
friends. At that point, Williams went into rehab, and after he emerged
from the facility, his family pressured him to get some structure in his
life and work a real job for a year. Laikin hired him as Randi Siegel’s
assistant. Williams had business cards made up calling himself vice
president of special operations.

A less frequent presence, though Laikin’s closest friend in the investor
group, was Tim Durham. Durham was a divided personality. He’d later
describe himself as “a quiet guy who likes to go to parties.” Laikin
thought Durham was a mathematical genius. He had the immovable hair and
stoic reserve of a midwestern football coach. But Durham also liked to
live huge. The biggest G.O.P. contributor in Indiana, he collected
exotic cars, lived in a 30,000-square-foot mansion in the Indianapolis
suburb of Fortville, and owned several private jets. In 2004, he told a
local reporter, “On the day I die, I want to be the richest man in the
world.”

National Lampoon wasn’t a business with the usual corporate controls.
Randi Siegel would throw a bunch of receipts on Laikin’s desk, and
Laikin would start peeling off bills from a wad of cash. Chris
Williams’s Hummer got used in productions, and Laikin’s homes were used
for shoots as well as to lodge employees visiting from the East Coast.
Laikin was a virtual teetotaler, but he and the F.O.D.’s socialized
incessantly. “Dan’s focus was thinking a lot of his work had to be done
after hours—dinners, red carpets, comedy clubs—and part of me said,
He’s probably right,” Doug Bennett, Laikin’s top deputy, says. “By its
very nature you get caught up in that world.”

It became a running joke among employees that they were living in a
movie called National Lampoon’s National Lampoon. Once, when a producer
came in to pitch a scripted show about a National Lampoon-like office,
Barry Layne, who clashed with Bennett, insisted that the role of company
president would need to be played—“literally”—by an empty suit on
a hanger. When Donnes made National Lampoon’s Dirty Movie, in 2011, it
was an over-the-top satire of National Lampoon itself, featuring
characters based on Laikin and Simmons.

But, for all this, there was a powerful camaraderie and shared sense of
mission among employees, who spoke of “bleeding Lampoon yellow,” the
color of the Lampoon logo. Laikin, too, became emotionally invested.
These were his people, and he inspired intense loyalty even among those
who disagreed with many of his decisions. “He could have, at the height
of his quote-unquote power, started and run a cult,” Layne says.
“People bought into Dan.”

“A Big Ball of Duct Tape”

The storming of Hollywood, however, turned out not to be so easy. It
seemed obvious to a tech investor from Indiana who initially referred to
his staff as “you Hollywood people” that the company’s potential was
huge and that his outsider’s perspective was just what was needed to
lift the stock out of the doldrums. What he hadn’t reckoned with,
though, was the disconnect between the public’s view of the brand and
the industry’s. In Hollywood, National Lampoon had a stink about it.
Laikin was presumed to be just the latest starry-eyed mark from
elsewhere—a sheep among wolves, awaiting the ritual fleecing.

One of Laikin’s miscalculations was his failure to grasp that Matty
Simmons was in fact unpopular among many Lampoon alumni. And while some
of those alumni would take a meeting with Laikin, including Chevy Chase,
John Landis, and Ivan Reitman, none went very far.

“When the C.E.O. is saying Kato Kaelin is the funniest guy he’s ever
met, it’s hard for me to call Will Ferrell’s agent and be taken
seriously,” says Orin Woinsky, who was a vice president of film. “So
that was the big struggle.”

Laikin combined self-confidence and naïveté at his peril. As Lorne
Michaels had discovered, Burly Bear (now the College Network) was hard
to make money from, because it wasn’t measured by Nielsen. At a time
when advertising was moving online, Lampoon was still distributing
FedExed DVDs and was unable to provide any of the metrics media buyers
were increasingly demanding. Also, the non-H.D. library was suddenly out
of date. Some tried to warn Laikin that production costs weren’t going
to be as low as people had told him and that the digital traffic he was
getting wasn’t going to support a viable business model. “There was no
patience and no real understanding of how difficult it can be,” Woinsky
says, “or ever a meeting where it was: Here’s what we need to do now in
order to be where we want to be in 10 years, and here are the steps we
need to take, and here are the 5 to 10 things we need to ask about any
project that walks in the door.”

Instead, the operative strategy became: Throw shit against the wall and
see what sticks. “Once Dan began to see that it’s a much more
complicated process in Hollywood to get shows up and running,” Siegel
says, “he started doing things that were going to be fast moneymakers.
So there was one group fighting for the brand and another group
destroying it.”

For those who’d devoted their careers to comedy, every week seemed to
bring a new indignity. In New York, Donnes, at the time a radio
syndicator who’d bought the rights to revive National Lampoon Radio
Hour, found himself rolling his eyes at the ideas coming out of the
company’s headquarters, like a plan to stage a Miss National Lampoontang
contest on college campuses, and another to change the company’s
stock-ticker symbol to POON. “Whenever we saw the L.A. office calling
on caller ID, we’d cringe,” Donnes says.

Randi Siegel, who had been Jimmy Fallon’s manager, was forced to defer
to Reno Rolle, who was in the infomercial world, on the question of
which stand-ups to use in a video release. “It became diminishing
returns,” she says. Matty Simmons didn’t last long, either. In one
meeting, according to MoDMaN, then the company’s art director, “someone
was like ‘Who are you?’ to Matty Fucking Simmons. He said, ‘Look who I
was surrounded by: John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd. Who you got:
Bridget the Midget?’ ” (To be fair, Simmons also produced the Jon Bon
Jovi vehicle Pucked.) “We got along well,” Simmons says of Laikin.
“But everything I told him to do, he didn’t do.”

Scott Rubin was asked to write jokes for National Lampoon’s Strip Poker,
a witless pay-per-view series featuring Kaelin and a group of lovelies
(including Olivia Munn, then known as Lisa) at the Hedonism II nudist
resort in Jamaica. “You could see the pain in Scott’s face every day,”
Orin Woinsky says. Strip Poker was a deal that had come with money
attached, but it wasn’t just off-brand; it had trouble finding
distribution. It was too raunchy for Walmart, and not raunchy enough for
porn channels.

“It was like managing a zoo,” Laikin says.

Bridget “the Midget” Powers in 2008.

By Adrian Varnedoe/pacificcoastnews.com.

Given the success of Van Wilder, no one at the company was opposed to
licensing the brand, but the first projects Laikin brought in were
execrable. After he asked Scott Rubin to read a script called Dorm Daze,
“I said, ‘You’re fucking with me, aren’t you, Dan?,’ ” Rubin recalls.
“ ‘This is a joke. You do see what we’re trying to do here, don’t you?’
He goes, ‘No, we’re making the movie.’ I said, ‘I’m begging you not to
make this.’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t see you bringing in $500,000,’ if
that was the amount. That’s how they always got me—‘I don’t see you
bringing in the money.’ “ (“That’s the kind of movie,” Woinsky says
of Dorm Daze, “you work at that company, you can’t get out of bed for
two days.”)

But Laikin and Durham had put a lot of money into the company
already—$5.3 million, by July 2003, just from Durham, according to a
later court filing—and needed to keep the doors open. The licensing
deals were seductive. They meant free money for a company that was
undercapitalized. And in the short term, some of Laikin’s decisions
worked. Dorm Daze was a hit on DVD, encouraging him to become even more
promiscuous with film-licensing deals. A long run of forgettable cinema
followed. (Please don’t say you remember Barely Legal, Going the
Distance, Gold Diggers, or Dorm Daze 2, to name only four examples.)

“I felt like a lot of things were shortcuts, putting duct tape on
things instead of fixing them,” Marty Dundics says. “Then it had so
much duct tape on it, it was just a big ball of duct tape. That’s a good
way to think of the company from 2004 on.”

Some ideas were reasonably on-brand but failed spectacularly in their
execution. The home office arranged a 10-city hot-wing-eating contest,
but scheduled one of them at a community college in Miami that turned
out to be closed for summer break. Worse, they had failed to appreciate
the fraught cultural politics of including a historically black college
on the list. “Holy shit—we did a chicken-wing-eating contest at
Howard University,” recalls Rob Bardunias, who was tasked with running
the event. “We’re National Lampoon: you can guess how many minority
employees we have. So it’s four white kids showing up at Howard
University to do a chicken-wing-eating contest. There were two student
groups protesting our very presence there.” Then, as the contest ended,
the food-service workers wheeled out dessert. “I don’t want to say what
it was,” Bardunias says. (It was watermelon.) “The girl who ran events
for Howard was next to me. She was like, ‘Oh no, they are not.’ I said,
‘You need to stop them, right now.’ We literally dragged the cart back
into the kitchen. They said, ‘Well, it was a barbecue.’ ”

“An ongoing theme,” Dundics says, “was: great ideas, bad execution,
or not enough resources.” Another ongoing theme was not-great ideas.
Laikin partnered with Las Vegas developer Lorenzo Doumani (whose father,
Edward, and uncle, Fred Doumani Sr., owned the Tropicana when the Mafia
was allegedly skimming money there) to launch Clubhouse, a National
Lampoon “family brand” spin-off for tweens. It produced a single
movie, Monster Night, with a screenplay by Doumani. “What? ‘Cause
‘National Lampoon’ screams ‘children,’ ” Randi Siegel says. While most
saw the project as being wildly misguided from a branding perspective,
Laikin viewed Clubhouse’s failure as stemming mainly from a poor choice
of partner. (Laikin and Doumani ended up in a lawsuit.)

Poor choice of partners proved a recurring problem. Unable to get
traction with the Hollywood establishment, Laikin appeared ready to work
with just about anyone. “There were those of us who’d been in the
business a long time,” Siegel says, “who told him not to do business
with certain people. Dan had a tendency to trust people that were
probably not the best people to trust. I think he wanted to see the good
in it and change things.” He didn’t necessarily have much choice. If
you’re not playing in Hollywood’s big leagues, you’re playing in its
minors, which teem with marginal characters. Besides Doumani, there was
producer Julius Nasso, the Gambino-affiliated ex-business partner of
Steven Seagal who’d gone to prison for extorting the actor; producer
David Pritchard (who would later go to prison over a fraudulent
movie-investment scheme); producer Elie Samaha (who’d recently been hit
with a jury verdict of $106 million for defrauding a German
distributor); and other dubious personalities. “Everyone Danny hung out
with was sketchy,” says someone who did business with Laikin. Laikin,
for his part, blames the milieu: “I’m telling you, I don’t surround
myself with these people. I don’t search them out. They’re all over this
town.”

By 2005, Laikin and Durham were still funneling millions of dollars into
the company, which lost $12 million that year and had a cumulative
deficit approaching $21 million. For Barry Layne, who in his own way
bled Lampoon yellow, the situation was exasperating. After a withering
article about the company’s attempted turnaround appeared in The New
York Times, Barry Layne says, “there was a sense that there was no
acknowledgment that there was actual work going on, no acceptance of any
quality, and a sense of resignation: It doesn’t matter what we do, we’re
not them. We’re not [co-founder] Doug Kenney. We’re not the Vacation
guys. We’re never going to be Ivan Reitman or John Landis or John
Belushi. So you’re held to a standard that is so difficult.”

Hoosiers in Hollywood

Late that year, Laikin took a step that at the time might have looked
auspicious to untrained eyes. With the J2 lease in Westwood having
expired, National Lampoon moved into a three-story building on Sunset
Boulevard, across the road from the Chateau Marmont. Physically, it was
a leap from the margins of Hollywood to its center. The roof had an
iconic view of the Strip. The landlord was Elie Samaha. “If you’ve been
around Hollywood for any time, it isn’t the premier location you might
think,” says MoDMaN, the art director. “It kind of smacks of that
whole outsider, interloper, rookie move. You weren’t moving to someplace
cool or interesting but to someplace expected.” And no one seemed to be
given pause by the fact that the brand’s most famous son had mainlined a
fatal speedball just across the street. In fact, says Justin Kanew, then
a young development executive, “everyone liked being in the shadow of
where Belushi was.”

The company was strapped for cash, but the executives’ default lunch
spot became Marmont, and Laikin further streamlined his schedule when he
bought a $4.5 million house in Laurel Canyon just a nine-minute walk up
the hill: a nearly 9,000-square-foot Old Hollywood mansion on three
acres that had once belonged to music impresario Ralph Peer. After years
of quasi-commuting from Indiana, he moved full-time to L.A., while his
wife and children remained in the Midwest. The moves to Sunset and
Laurel Canyon coincided with an unwitting re-creation of the National
Lampoon brand as executive lifestyle. “It was pretty much debauchery
day in and day out,” one participant recalls.

“Drinking, partying, sleeping around,” says Noah Haeussner, then a
21-year-old junior staffer. “There was this blood going through you at
that company that made you go off the rails and live the brand.” One
executive started dating a porn star. Scot Richardson, who produced a
show on the College Network, remembers a dinner where Laikin’s family,
including his young daughter, was present while a Lampoon employee at
the same table quietly “got a handjob.” Many of the investors were
Hoosiers in Hollywood, midlife businessmen from boring industries in the
Corn Belt heeding la-la land’s age-old siren call. According to
Haeussner, the Laikin house became the site of raucous parties (it was
also the setting for a season of The Bachelor). “The high-end call
girls got out of hand,” says Haeussner, who claims he was tasked with
hiring them. “I was given a shitload of cash.” Laikin claims that only
one party at the house “got out of control,” and that he never gave
Haeussner money to hire prostitutes.

A company event at the Playboy Mansion, 2008.

By Clinton Wallace/Globe Photos/zumapress.com.

One of the more enthusiastic participants in these high jinks was Tim
Durham, who until now had been only an occasional presence in L.A. In
August 2005, Durham bought a $3.9 million house in the Hills, and he
started spending more time in the city. His lifestyle was cinematically
opulent. Besides owning three private jets and a 100-foot yacht named
Obsidian, Durham had an Indianapolis house with a 30-car garage to
accommodate his rotation of more than 70 cars, which included, besides
your run-of-the-mill Ferraris and Lamborghinis, a DeLorean, a McLaren, a
1929 Auburn Speedster, and the 1929 Duesenberg Phaeton that Elvis
Presley had driven in the movie Spinout. Durham was dating a Playboy
Playmate named Jami Ferrell.

For his 45th birthday, Durham hosted 1,000 people for a Playboy
Mansion-themed lingerie party at his Indianapolis property. He wore a
smoking jacket. The guests included 30 “glamour models” flown in from
L.A.; sundry Indianapolis Colts; Lampoon people including Kato Kaelin,
Chris Williams, and Big Steve (Durham and Laikin’s driver in L.A.); and
the rapper Ludacris, with whom Durham had formed an unlikely friendship
after meeting him at the Indy 500. (Durham attended the 2007 MTV Music
Video Awards with Ludacris, Pamela Anderson, and Paris Hilton.) The
thematics were not subtle: six Peter Max portraits of Durham, ice
sculptures of dollar signs, and a cake frosted with a million-dollar
bill with Durham’s face on it.

At the same time, paradoxically, Laikin was taking steps to put
Lampoon’s house in order. As recently as early 2005, a
financial-industry newsletter was pointing to Lampoon’s losses and poor
liquidity and raising doubts about whether it could continue as a
“going concern.” But Laikin had a new clarity about what he needed to
do. The dysfunction caused by the power-sharing arrangement with Jim
Jimirro had projected an air of lunacy about the company, making it hard
to raise outside capital, and Laikin finally took action. Borrowing
money from Chris Williams and his family, Laikin at last bought Jimirro
out.

Soon after, the company did its first public stock offering under
Laikin, raising $10 million, and in 2006 he reached a settlement with
Universal over unpaid Animal House royalties that brought in another
$3.75 million. Laikin was also newly focused on which operations to
concentrate on going forward. By 2007, the National Lampoon Humor
Network, a collection of 55 affiliated Web sites that Lampoon could sell
ads across, was No. 1 on Comscore for comedy, ahead of the Onion,
College Humor, and Comedy Central. Laikin started buying up the
affiliates and seemed to have discovered a sustainable income stream.
And, feeling that Lampoon now had its own distribution channels in
place, he was ready to start making movies. “We said, No more
licensing,” Laikin recalls. “Time for creative.” The company acquired
a decent script to develop, The Lightning Club (“Animal House in
heaven”), and made a deal with Relativity to co-produce it. More
immediately, principal photography began on Bagboy, a movie about the
world of competitive grocery bagging that the company bragged had
Farrelly brothers involvement. (The Farrellys had merely let the
producers, who included a brother-in-law and a friend, use their name in
a press release.) It was the first in-house production since 1989.
“This is an extraordinary day in the evolution of National Lampoon,”
Laikin crowed in a press release announcing completion of the month-long
shoot in Utah.

But the clarity of vision was accompanied by the loss of president Doug
Bennett, or as Bennett puts it, “The ‘No’ man left in 2006.” And the
old amateurishness remained. Laikin’s executives vied for credits on the
movies. One, whose background was in the business department of a
postproduction-services company, had an acting cameo and worked as a
second-unit director on Bagboy. Also, the movies just weren’t very good.

And despite Laikin’s rosy declarations, the move into production hadn’t
stopped the company from whoring out its brand—as late as 2008, it was
still getting 50 percent of its revenue from licensing. Some of the
films that came out as National Lampoon movies during this period
included Jake’s Booty Call, The Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell,
and Electric Apricot: Quest for Festeroo.

Meanwhile, Laikin was making ever stranger deals. The company contracted
to put its name on “a new line of Artesian and flavored water.” It
also bought AllModelZone.com, an online modeling market (“for the
traffic,” Laikin insists). None of which did anything to burnish
National Lampoon’s industry reputation. A 2006 Associated Press review
of National Lampoon’s Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj (third in the series)
said that “the National Lampoon, once a brand name above nearly all
others in comedy, has become shorthand for pathetic frat boy humor.”

Whether or not Bagboy, Ratko: The Dictator’s Son, and The Legend of
Awesomest Maximus—the three films produced in-house under
Laikin—would have vaulted National Lampoon back to cultural
pre-eminence, had the stock market kept rising, will be for historians
to debate. But in 2007, Laikin could see the home-video market drying
up. The Great Recession was beginning. Already committed pre-sales went
away. With Bagboy, Laikin wanted the distributor’s fee, too, and decided
to self-distribute, to little effect.

By the summer of 2008, employees say, there was a sense of dread and
panic in the office. Homes in Los Angeles were under water financially.
National Lampoon’s stock was down to $1. The American Stock Exchange
had threatened the company with de-listing. The gap between revenues and
costs was narrowing, but Lampoon still showed a $1.7 million loss for
the year, and the cumulative deficit was now up to $42 million.

The caliber of visitors to the office further “devolved,” MoDMaN says.
“There were more and more shady characters and shady deals. More and
more, there was a sense of desperation. It was a classic interloper fall
from grace: you come in, you’re going to change Hollywood, and Hollywood
changes you.” The charitable view was that Laikin was being generous in
not reducing people to their checkered reputations. But if so, as the
C.E.O. of a public corporation, he may not have shown the best judgment.
“There were people sometimes in rooms that when I found out I turned
around and walked out,” a senior executive says. “Dan had this
attraction to people other people thought were bad guys.”

One of those guys was a bipolar cocaine addict named Kevin Waltzer.
Laikin found the laggardly stock price maddening, and that spring an
East Coast comedy-club owner named Edward Rodriguez who knew of Laikin’s
frustrations introduced him to a Philadelphia broker who said he could
help goose the stock from $1.50 to $5.00. Starting in March, Laikin
wired the broker funds to buy Lampoon stock, in order to create the
appearance of trading activity and, it was hoped, spur interest from the
market. But the stock still didn’t rise. Rodriguez then introduced
Laikin to another Philadelphia broker, Waltzer, who tried to do the same
thing without any success. By May, Laikin had called off the scheme, but
before he did so, earlier that month, he had met with Rodriguez and
Waltzer at the National Lampoon offices. Unbeknownst to Laikin, Waltzer
was an F.B.I. informant, and he was wearing a wire.

At Laikin’s house that December 15, at 6:45 A.M., F.B.I. agents with
guns drawn handcuffed Laikin and took him into custody. Big Steve,
Laikin’s driver, was sleeping in the guesthouse and stayed there until
the F.B.I. had taken Laikin away. “I was like, What the fuck? What did
Dan do?” Trading in Lampoon stock, which Laikin had only wanted to go
up, was suspended at $.73 a share. When trading resumed, it would
instantly lose another 85 percent of its value, ending at $.10 a share.

Left, the poster for 2011’s Dirty Movie; Right, the Attack of the 5′2″ Women poster, 1994.

From Grindstone Entertainment Group; Right, from Paramount Home Video, both from Photofest.

Peter Max, Ludacris, and a Penthouse Pet

Laikin stepped down as C.E.O. of National Lampoon and was immediately
replaced by his friend and fellow Indiana investor Tim Durham, who
besides sitting on the board was the second-largest shareholder after
Laikin. The era that followed is remembered largely for what Durham
didn’t do. Right away, he shut down the College TV Network, the film
side, and all other operating divisions. He stopped paying the
contractually required royalty to Harvard Lampoon. Laikin deals like The
Lightning Club died.

Durham did sue Warner Bros., questioning its accounting on Vacation and
claiming National Lampoon was still owed millions. The Sunset office
went from three floors to two to one, then to four offices. Some people
quit. Others were fired. Still others had their salaries cut, and even
then payroll would get delayed. Scott Rubin was let go within a month,
and C.F.O. Lorraine Evanoff, who’d always appreciated Laikin’s open-door
policy, resigned after Durham put a DON’T COME IN sign on his office
door, which he kept locked even when he was inside. Despite the
cost-cutting measures, the company would report a net loss of nearly $6
million for the fiscal year ending July 31, 2009.

Durham’s austerity stopped at the door to the building on Sunset. For
$25,000 a month, he was now renting a 16,000-square-foot mansion with a
five-car garage just down the road from Laikin’s big compound. Durham
hung a giant Peter Max portrait of Frank Sinatra in the living room and
set aside a bedroom for Ludacris to stay in when he visited from
Atlanta. Durham also started dating, and eventually became engaged to, a
former Penthouse Pet of the Month named Erica Taylor. He had Lampoon
business cards made for her that identified Taylor as a “creative
executive,” and he put her on the company’s health-insurance plan.

Durham did enjoy the role of Hollywood player. He had Ludacris do the
voice-over narration on Awesomest Maximus, which was in postproduction.
Danny DeVito shot a horror short at the Durham house (casting Erica
Taylor as the lead). And Durham made an effort to meet with industry
people. When Jon Schwartz, an executive at Relativity, went with
colleagues to Durham’s house to pitch themselves as management, Durham
led them to his screening room. He was eager to show a 12-minute clip
from Awesomest Maximus, which he thought was hilarious, and turned on
his alphabetically organized Kaleidescape entertainment system. “He had
30 movies starting with Anal,” Schwartz remembers. “It was all anal
porn. He’s shifting through it fast to get to Awesomest. Once I saw
that, I thought: O.K., I get it.”

In early 2011, Durham e-mailed a colleague to say that he’d just spent
three hours with John Landis, who “is very interested in doing lampoon
movies again.” Landis did meet with Durham, he tells me in an e-mail,
but “definitely not for 3 hours,” and he “said I did not wish to be
involved! Everyone who has bought the National Lampoon through the years
(including Tim Matheson!) has contacted me with some bad script or
concept with which they want me to ‘revitalize’ the ‘brand.’ ”

Durham made a similar overture to the Farrelly brothers, and Peter
Farrelly agreed to meet one Friday evening. He and his wife, Melinda,
were on their way out somewhere, so they met with Durham together at a
bar in West Hollywood, where Durham explained how he was making money.
What followed was a detailed account of an Internet promotion Durham was
running that appeared to be a cell-phone giveaway but was really an
elaborate ruse, requiring hours of filling out forms, to get people to
provide data which Durham then sold to companies. Farrelly recounts: “I
say, ‘But then you have to give them a phone.’ He says, ‘You’d have to
fill out forms for 4, 5, 6 hours to get the phone. It would be one bored
kid every week or two would do it. But everyone else . . . ’ My wife
looked at me and said, ‘Get me the fuck out of here.’ I said to my wife,
‘Why would I get involved with a guy who makes his living scamming
people?’ It was one of the strangest meetings. My wife still talks about
it.”

By now, Durham had problems that went far beyond Lampoon, and, at least
in part, he had Laikin to thank.

Laikin, who had originally been charged with stock manipulation and
ultimately pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of conspiracy, was
sentenced to 45 months and reported to Taft Federal Prison Camp, a
low-security facility a couple hours’ drive north of L.A., in September
2010. By then, Tim Durham was already under the scrutiny of the F.B.I.,
which had, the previous November, raided both his Indiana offices and
the Ohio office of Fair Finance. But he seemed unconcerned, and he
continued to go about his business as National Lampoon C.E.O.

One day, Big Steve drove Durham to visit Laikin at Taft. Big Steve, who
had grown up in Compton and says he did 10 years in California prisons
for drug dealing, had asked friends at Taft to look out for Laikin, but
when Durham emerged from the meeting he was visibly upset. “In the car,
Tim was like, ‘Motherfucker,’ ” Big Steve recalls. “He was looking
out the window, typing. He said, ‘You know what the motherfucker did,
Steve? He told on me.’ ” It was true. Within three months of his own
arrest, Laikin, looking for a lighter sentence for himself, had informed
the F.B.I. that Durham was running a Ponzi scheme and that Fair Finance
“has funded everything that Durham owns.”

In early 2011, Durham was arrested much as Laikin had been, the F.B.I.
arriving at six A.M. at the house he was renting in the Hills. Erica
Taylor was there at the time, as was the now deceased character actor
Edward Herrmann, who shared the car bug with Durham. Fair Finance had
issued interest-bearing certificates to investors who in many cases had
turned over their life savings; the company was supposed to invest these
moneys by buying up receivables contracts (such as gym memberships), but
Durham was indicted on charges of looting more than $200 million from
the company—plundering the savings of 5,000 mostly working-class
investors.

Durham was now confined to his Indianapolis home and wearing a
government-issued ankle monitor, but, unlike Laikin, he refused to step
down as National Lampoon’s C.E.O. Instead, he issued stock to himself to
consolidate voting control and blocked board meetings from taking place.
And he continued to run National Lampoon remotely. “It was awkward,”
Marty Dundics remembers. “We’d have conference calls, and he’d be under
house arrest. It’s hard to get that out of your mind when he’s talking
about needing more Web traffic.” Durham was waiting for something: the
check from Warner Bros. The studio had agreed to pay $2.7 million as a
result of Durham’s audit of Vacation proceeds, and when the money
arrived at National Lampoon, in late July, he immediately wired $1
million of it to his criminal-defense lawyer.

“This Underdog You’re Rooting For”

Laikin emerged from Taft in May of 2013. He was still the largest
shareholder of National Lampoon. The terms of his sentencing precluded
serving as an officer or director again, but as a condition of his
parole he was required to report to a job for the first six months after
his release. Alan Donnes grudgingly gave him an office and a job at
Sunset Gower Studios, though not adjacent to the new Lampoon space.
Laikin and Donnes did not get along. Their relationship deteriorated to
the point where, one day, each tried to fire the other. (Unsuccessfully:
the governance of the company was more complicated than ever, with
Laikin’s family controlling three board seats, Jim Jimirro still in the
chairman’s seat, and Brian Bash, the Fair Finance bankruptcy trustee,
having say over who was C.E.O.)

Durham had treated Fair Finance and Obsidian and a number of other
companies as one giant, interconnected piggy bank, and a lot of money
had flowed from it, over time, to Laikin, to other Lampoon investors, to
Lampoon employees, and to friends. And so, Bash had come after them all,
trying to claw back money. Kaelin, Erica Taylor, Ludacris, and many
others all eventually reached settlements with him. Laikin, who the
trustee claimed had received $19 million of Fair Finance money,
eventually agreed to pay $3 million.

Bash went after National Lampoon too. Over the years, $9 million had
been wired to it via more than 200 transfers from Durham-affiliated
companies. Lampoon, claiming also to have been one of Durham’s victims,
settled with Bash for $3 million and sued Durham for the $1 million in
Vacation money that Durham had embezzled to pay his legal fees.

Donnes has his work cut out for him. The only thing keeping the lights
on, even now, 14 years after Laikin started running the company, are the
residual checks from Animal House and Vacation. Donnes is now focused on
doing everything he can to distance the company from its recent past.
“It took us a year to get real meetings,” he says. Donnes and his
business partner Jerry Daigle, Lampoon’s nominal C.E.O., committed to
doing deals only with mainstream-studio involvement. Eventually, they
got representation at CAA. The company has also launched an I Heart
Radio channel, relaunched the Web site, and made a deal with Fox 20th
Century Television for an animated series.

VIDEO: Watch Valerie Jarrett Endure an Awkward Comedy Pitch Meeting

Alumni of the Laikin and Durham eras swing between nostalgia and grief.
Cora Victoriano, who drained her own pension to pay the salaries of the
few remaining employees after Durham went to jail, still hasn’t been
reimbursed but continues to work for the company and remains optimistic:
“It’s never-ending hope for me. I’m always crossing my fingers.”

Many of the original investors ended up in lawsuits with one another or
National Lampoon and don’t socialize with Laikin anymore. (One of them,
Reno Rolle, has lately been busy with a new infomercial-worthy product,
the TurDle, an arched, foam, bowel-evacuation aid.)

Tim Durham was convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison for his
activities at Fair Finance. Bloomberg Businessweek called him “the
Madoff of the Midwest.” He is serving his sentence at a federal
penitentiary in Kentucky, where he has taught math to inmates. One of
his co-investors now says Durham “suffered from crippling self-doubt;
his only concern was how people viewed him.”

Many contrast Durham with Laikin, calling Durham a bad person and Laikin
a good-hearted man who did a dumb thing. I first met Laikin two years
ago at Chateau Marmont, where waiters greeted him as a long-lost
regular. “I haven’t been here in a while,” he said. Laikin has a
strong aversion to being photographed, and I’d only seen one picture of
him. In person, he was tan, with some gray showing at the roots of his
slicked-back, brown hair. He wore a Fitbit and explained that he’d lost
more than 40 pounds in prison by walking a lot and eating healthy food.
Friends of Laikin’s had told me that he’d traded pouches of StarKist
chunk light tuna—the de facto currency in federal prisons—for fresh
salads made from vegetables from the prison garden. He had also tried to
learn to play the guitar and to speak Spanish, and he had taught classes
on film finance and entrepreneurship. “He ran the whole place probably
better than he ran Lampoon,” Ben Gleib says. Now, at Marmont, Laikin
ordered a hamburger, with a side of broccoli instead of fries.

Having had plenty of time in prison to analyze his Lampoon experience,
Laikin said he now regrets not focusing more on content earlier. He
acknowledges that he was a deal junkie, but to this day he maintains
that the company had turned a corner, and that had he not been indicted,
the story would be a very different one to tell. He still thinks
National Lampoon has potential waiting to be unlocked.

Now Laikin consults on investments and young tech companies, mentors
ex-cons on entrepreneurship, and is at work on an idea that Donnes did
like: a cookbook and reality-TV show based on microwave recipes using
only ingredients available in the prison commissary. “It was shocking
to me how good the food was,” Laikin said during my last meeting with
him, scrolling through a PDF on his phone of recipes like spicy tuna
rolls and Thai chicken. He had also brought in a deal to Lampoon to
license its name to the Off Broadway shows Bayside! The Musical! and
Full House! The Musical! “Danny still wants to do something with
National Lampoon,” Lorraine Evanoff, his old C.F.O., says. “I say, Do
a new branding campaign: We went through the midlife crisis. We drove
the BMW off the cliff. We’re back.”

“What everyone always does at the company is feel like something big is
about to happen, and I want to be here for it,” Marty Dundics says.
“We’re one hit movie away from, or one big thing away from, being back
on top. It’s always this underdog you’re rooting for. And you don’t want
to miss it. That big thing that’s about to happen. That was always the
mood.” At press time, it was looking like Dundics might finally get his
wish: National Lampoon was finalizing exclusive negotiations to be
acquired by PalmStar Media, an upstart film and TV studio.

Laikin’s family has relocated to L.A. They still own the Malibu house,
but sold the Hills house for $6.5 million to Katy Perry and Russell
Brand, who never moved in and sold it at a loss to Laikin’s nemesis
Lorenzo Doumani. Laikin doesn’t go back to Indiana much.

After appearing in Knocked Up and/or The 40-Year-Old Virgin, this quartet can now be considered summa cum laude graduates of the Judd Apatow school of comedy. Unlike so many comedy stars of the last two decades, they—and the other funny people depicted on the following pages—seem at their best when they work not as soloists but as part of a tightly knit ensemble. Say good-bye to the laughter of alienation and hello to a brand of comedy that fosters a feeling of community. Rather than dominate a crowd, they conspire with the people in the audience. Their strength lies in their charm. Even Rogen. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz (in tribute to her own March 2006 cover shot) on Stage 28 at Paramount Pictures Studio Lot, Los Angeles.

Photo: Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

DANNY McBRIDE, The Breakthrough

Actor, writer, producer.
He-e-e-e-e-re’s … Danny! In the last couple of years he’s burst through the door like no one since Jack Nicholson in The Shining. In Pineapple Express, he was sick funny as Red, a freakish low-life dealer who never starts a fight he can’t lose in an extremely painful manner. (In real life, McBride’s head was split open by a bong during filming.) And in a cast of brilliant comic actors, he still managed to steal a corner of Tropic Thunder for himself as the lunatic pyrotechnician. McBride has a special talent for taking your average everyday dumb-ass and making him into someone you hate to love. That’s what he’s been doing as the star of the new HBO comedy series East Bound and Down, in which he plays an ex-major-leaguer working as a gym teacher. The show’s co–executive producer is Will Ferrell, who appears on it from time to time. McBride will in turn be lending Ferrell comic support in the likely summertime comedy blockbuster Land of the Lost. Photographed by Mark Seliger in Los Angeles.

Photo: Photograph by Mark Seliger.

RUSSELL BRAND, The Comic

Actor, writer, naughty boy.
The flamboyant, handsome, and very hairy Russell Brand may not attain the worldwide fame and influence of Charlie Chaplin, but he’s a huge talent with an adroit physicality and large ambitions. Americans got a taste of this British provocateur in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Brand’s character, the vain pop star Aldous Snow, made for an unusually multifaceted comedy villain: he’s shallow, obnoxious, and pompous, but also shows himself to be insecure, self-aware, good-hearted, and given to bouts of melancholy. Aldous will return as the hero of Get Him to the Greek, a rock ’n’ roll comedy from the Judd Apatow factory scheduled for 2010. Before then, Brand will try to kindle a love affair with American audiences via his first Comedy Central special (his stand-up is influenced by Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks); a turn as the jester Trinculo in Julie Taymor’s film of The Tempest; and the U.S. release of his memoir, My Bookie Wook, a U.K. best-seller, which chronicles an odd upbringing, heroin and crack use, sex addiction, rehab, and his dismissal from British MTV after he arrived dressed as Osama bin Laden on September 12, 2001. Photographed by Mark Seliger in Los Angeles.

Do they option photographs? Because this might work—The Honeymooners updated for 2010. Jason Bateman may not be big enough or loud enough to pull off a Jackie Gleason–style Ralph Kramden, but, as he proved in Arrested Development and Hancock, he has on-screen charm to spare. Leslie Mann, who will anchor the most-anticipated comedy of the year, Funny People (written and directed by her husband, Judd Apatow), looks ready to go as the too-good-for-this-world Alice. Saturday Night Live stalwart Bill Hader, the heir to the Dan Aykroyd cunning-doofus crown, who has lent his distinctive touch to Pineapple Express (the opening minutes) and Forgetting Sarah Marshall (those idiotic/amusing video chats), provides a more muscular Norton. And Anna Faris, so lovely and Goldie Hawn–ishly hilarious in The House Bunny, almost out-Trixies Trixie. Action, already. Photographed by Norman Jean Roy in Los Angeles.

Photo: Photographs by Norman Jean Roy.

AMY POEHLER and WILL ARNETT, The Accomplices

Actors, writers.
Some Saturday Night Live cast members just made you laugh (Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, Will Ferrell). Others made you laugh and freaked you out at the same time (Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, Molly Shannon). And one made you laugh while scaring you (John Belushi). With Amy Poehler, there was something new. She certainly got her share of laughs in her eight-season tenure on the show, but she also inspired the kind of affection that’s hard to come by at that hour of the night. Last October, when it was announced on-air that she was absent because she was having a baby, there was something like an awwwww from the crowd, mixed with some seriously warm applause. Poehler will continue her cuddly relationship with NBC viewers soon, as the star of a new Thursday-night sitcom, Parks and Recreation. The Han Solo–esque stud on this page would be Will Arnett, Poehler’s husband. If you’ve seen Arnett as the entertainingly insufferable G. O. B. Bluth II on the late Fox sitcom Arrested Development, or in Blades of Glory or Semi-pro or, God help you, Let’s Go to Prison, you know there’s something not right about him. In a good way. He’s now doing his thing on 30 Rock, as Devon Banks, a corporate climber overwhelmed by his own gayness. Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier in New York.

Photo: Photographs by Patrick Demarchelier.

JASON SEGEL, The Loner

Actor, writer, producer, songwriter, singer, puppeteer.
The great silent-film comedian Buster Keaton got his name (bestowed upon him by Harry Houdini, according to showbiz legend) because, as a kid on the vaudeville circuit, he was willing to take a lot of physical punishment for a laugh. Jason Segel, with his quick smile and basset-hound eyes, doesn’t do much traditional slapstick, but he has taken part in a few pretty devastating pratfalls—though his are of the emotional variety. Does anybody cry funnier than Segel does in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the wonderful rom-com farce he not only starred in but wrote? Has anybody done funnier full frontal nudity than he does in the movie’s infamous naked-breakup scene? This alumnus of Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks and Knocked Up will next appear as a slightly unhinged pal to Paul Rudd in the springtime buddy comedy I Love You, Man. Segel is also putting his scripting and puppeteering skills to use in the next Muppets movie for Disney. Photographed by Norman Jean Roy in Los Angeles.

Photo: Photograph by Norman Jean Roy.

SETH ROGEN, The Auteur

Actor, writer, producer.
With his booming voice and bearish appearance, Rogen has displayed a commanding screen presence in comedy hits such as Knocked Up and Zack and Miri Make a Porno, and he may go on to achieve something like Will Smith–level celebrity when he becomes known even to grade-schoolers as a voice in the upcoming animated Monsters vs. Aliens and as the star of 2010’s The Green Hornet. But the amazing thing about Rogen is that he (along with collaborator Evan Goldberg) is one of the finest screenwriters going, with Superbad and Pineapple Express to his credit. Both pictures borrow elements from the films of Quentin Tarantino and Rogen’s mentor, Judd Apatow, to freshen up the action-buddy genre for a generation raised on reality TV and YouTube. Rogen is set up for another memorable year, with a part in Apatow’s Funny People and a starring role as an unstable security guard in the mall comedy Observe and Report.Photographed by Norman Jean Roy in Los Angeles.

After appearing in Knocked Up and/or The 40-Year-Old Virgin, this quartet can now be considered summa cum laude graduates of the Judd Apatow school of comedy. Unlike so many comedy stars of the last two decades, they—and the other funny people depicted on the following pages—seem at their best when they work not as soloists but as part of a tightly knit ensemble. Say good-bye to the laughter of alienation and hello to a brand of comedy that fosters a feeling of community. Rather than dominate a crowd, they conspire with the people in the audience. Their strength lies in their charm. Even Rogen. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz (in tribute to her own March 2006 cover shot) on Stage 28 at Paramount Pictures Studio Lot, Los Angeles.

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

DANNY McBRIDE, The Breakthrough

Actor, writer, producer.
He-e-e-e-e-re’s … Danny! In the last couple of years he’s burst through the door like no one since Jack Nicholson in The Shining. In Pineapple Express, he was sick funny as Red, a freakish low-life dealer who never starts a fight he can’t lose in an extremely painful manner. (In real life, McBride’s head was split open by a bong during filming.) And in a cast of brilliant comic actors, he still managed to steal a corner of Tropic Thunder for himself as the lunatic pyrotechnician. McBride has a special talent for taking your average everyday dumb-ass and making him into someone you hate to love. That’s what he’s been doing as the star of the new HBO comedy series East Bound and Down, in which he plays an ex-major-leaguer working as a gym teacher. The show’s co–executive producer is Will Ferrell, who appears on it from time to time. McBride will in turn be lending Ferrell comic support in the likely summertime comedy blockbuster Land of the Lost. Photographed by Mark Seliger in Los Angeles.

Photograph by Mark Seliger.

RUSSELL BRAND, The Comic

Actor, writer, naughty boy.
The flamboyant, handsome, and very hairy Russell Brand may not attain the worldwide fame and influence of Charlie Chaplin, but he’s a huge talent with an adroit physicality and large ambitions. Americans got a taste of this British provocateur in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Brand’s character, the vain pop star Aldous Snow, made for an unusually multifaceted comedy villain: he’s shallow, obnoxious, and pompous, but also shows himself to be insecure, self-aware, good-hearted, and given to bouts of melancholy. Aldous will return as the hero of Get Him to the Greek, a rock ’n’ roll comedy from the Judd Apatow factory scheduled for 2010. Before then, Brand will try to kindle a love affair with American audiences via his first Comedy Central special (his stand-up is influenced by Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks); a turn as the jester Trinculo in Julie Taymor’s film of The Tempest; and the U.S. release of his memoir, My Bookie Wook, a U.K. best-seller, which chronicles an odd upbringing, heroin and crack use, sex addiction, rehab, and his dismissal from British MTV after he arrived dressed as Osama bin Laden on September 12, 2001. Photographed by Mark Seliger in Los Angeles.

Do they option photographs? Because this might work—The Honeymooners updated for 2010. Jason Bateman may not be big enough or loud enough to pull off a Jackie Gleason–style Ralph Kramden, but, as he proved in Arrested Development and Hancock, he has on-screen charm to spare. Leslie Mann, who will anchor the most-anticipated comedy of the year, Funny People (written and directed by her husband, Judd Apatow), looks ready to go as the too-good-for-this-world Alice. Saturday Night Live stalwart Bill Hader, the heir to the Dan Aykroyd cunning-doofus crown, who has lent his distinctive touch to Pineapple Express (the opening minutes) and Forgetting Sarah Marshall (those idiotic/amusing video chats), provides a more muscular Norton. And Anna Faris, so lovely and Goldie Hawn–ishly hilarious in The House Bunny, almost out-Trixies Trixie. Action, already. Photographed by Norman Jean Roy in Los Angeles.

Photographs by Norman Jean Roy.

PAUL RUDD, The Role Model

Actor, writer.
It’s … alive! More than that, the career of Paul Rudd is thriving. He got a lot of attention for his banter with Seth Rogen in The 40-Year-Old Virgin (“Know how I know you’re gay?”), delivered with an easy manner that masks a depth of feeling. Rudd may well end up this generation’s Jack Lemmon. His steady work is made possible partly by his enviable range, which allows him to play oddballs (his touched-in-the-head surfing instructor in Forgetting Sarah Marshall), romantic leading man (alongside Michelle Pfeiffer in the seriously underrated Amy Heckerling film I Could Never Be Your Woman), and at least one alienated guy (in Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things). In Monsters vs. Aliens, he voices a yuppie weatherman whose fiancée turns into a giant. In last year’s Role Models, which he co-wrote, he starred as a charming misanthrope who learns, bit by bit, not to hate everyone else quite so much. With its hard-R jokes and child actors, Role Models was a strange little package, but it gave us probably the best on-screen representation of Rudd-ness we’ve had—at least until the upcoming bro-mantic comedy I Love You, Man, in which he plays a so-called “girlfriend guy” who needs to find a best man in time for his wedding day. Photographed by Art Streiber in Los Angeles.

Photograph by Art Streiber.

JONAH HILL, The Chopper

Actor, writer.
Even when he plays characters who tend to freak out over little things—think of his germophobic tizzy in *Knocked Up’*s hospital scene or his anxiety attack outside the liquor store in Superbad—Jonah Hill exudes a feeling of calm. His steady gaze and deliberate, crystal-clear way with a line bring to mind Christopher Walken. And perhaps no other actor has managed to get away with talking so much filth while conveying a puppy-dog sweetness.(Were he to cut down the cherry tree of yore, he would probably say something like “I chopped it down and I’m really very fucking sorry about it.”) Hill was likable even when playing the waiter with creepy stalker tendencies in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Look for him to brighten up three movies in the coming months: Judd Apatow’s Funny People,Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, and the much-anticipated alternative-reality comedy from Ricky Gervais, This Side of the Truth.Photographed by Sam Jones in Los Angeles.

Photograph by Sam Jones.

AMY POEHLER and WILL ARNETT, The Accomplices

Actors, writers.
Some Saturday Night Live cast members just made you laugh (Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, Will Ferrell). Others made you laugh and freaked you out at the same time (Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, Molly Shannon). And one made you laugh while scaring you (John Belushi). With Amy Poehler, there was something new. She certainly got her share of laughs in her eight-season tenure on the show, but she also inspired the kind of affection that’s hard to come by at that hour of the night. Last October, when it was announced on-air that she was absent because she was having a baby, there was something like an awwwww from the crowd, mixed with some seriously warm applause. Poehler will continue her cuddly relationship with NBC viewers soon, as the star of a new Thursday-night sitcom, Parks and Recreation. The Han Solo–esque stud on this page would be Will Arnett, Poehler’s husband. If you’ve seen Arnett as the entertainingly insufferable G. O. B. Bluth II on the late Fox sitcom Arrested Development, or in Blades of Glory or Semi-pro or, God help you, Let’s Go to Prison, you know there’s something not right about him. In a good way. He’s now doing his thing on 30 Rock, as Devon Banks, a corporate climber overwhelmed by his own gayness. Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier in New York.

Photographs by Patrick Demarchelier.

JASON SEGEL, The Loner

Actor, writer, producer, songwriter, singer, puppeteer.
The great silent-film comedian Buster Keaton got his name (bestowed upon him by Harry Houdini, according to showbiz legend) because, as a kid on the vaudeville circuit, he was willing to take a lot of physical punishment for a laugh. Jason Segel, with his quick smile and basset-hound eyes, doesn’t do much traditional slapstick, but he has taken part in a few pretty devastating pratfalls—though his are of the emotional variety. Does anybody cry funnier than Segel does in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the wonderful rom-com farce he not only starred in but wrote? Has anybody done funnier full frontal nudity than he does in the movie’s infamous naked-breakup scene? This alumnus of Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks and Knocked Up will next appear as a slightly unhinged pal to Paul Rudd in the springtime buddy comedy I Love You, Man. Segel is also putting his scripting and puppeteering skills to use in the next Muppets movie for Disney. Photographed by Norman Jean Roy in Los Angeles.

Photograph by Norman Jean Roy.

SETH ROGEN, The Auteur

Actor, writer, producer.
With his booming voice and bearish appearance, Rogen has displayed a commanding screen presence in comedy hits such as Knocked Up and Zack and Miri Make a Porno, and he may go on to achieve something like Will Smith–level celebrity when he becomes known even to grade-schoolers as a voice in the upcoming animated Monsters vs. Aliens and as the star of 2010’s The Green Hornet. But the amazing thing about Rogen is that he (along with collaborator Evan Goldberg) is one of the finest screenwriters going, with Superbad and Pineapple Express to his credit. Both pictures borrow elements from the films of Quentin Tarantino and Rogen’s mentor, Judd Apatow, to freshen up the action-buddy genre for a generation raised on reality TV and YouTube. Rogen is set up for another memorable year, with a part in Apatow’s Funny People and a starring role as an unstable security guard in the mall comedy Observe and Report.Photographed by Norman Jean Roy in Los Angeles.